Our featured participant for the day is Hues n Shades, where the poem in response to Day Nine’s prompt brings us a wonderfully complex sense of rhythm and rhyme.
Today’s featured resource is a virtual visit to the Sistine Chapel. I went there many years ago and marveled at the wonderful paintings (while also getting quite the crick in my neck from craning up to look at the ceiling). But when I went to talk over them later that day with the friend I was traveling with, he admitted that he couldn’t really see anything because he’d forgotten to put in his contacts that morning (!)
Now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). Yesterday, we looked at a poem that used sound in a very particular way, to create a slow and mysterious feeling. Mark Bibbins’ poem, “At the End of the Endless Decade,” uses sound very differently, with less eerieness and more wordplay. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that, like Bibbins’, uses alliteration and punning. See if you can’t work in references to at least one word you have trouble spelling, and one that you’ve never quite been able to perfectly remember the meaning of.
Happy writing!
Lexicon Lag
Forever fumbling occurrence—
those ceaseless c’s and r’s curl up
like commas in a hammock,
mocking my muscle memory.
I draft desire in disappearing ink,
deliberate as a daffodil in December.
Call it aporia, I think? Or is that
the itch of doubt? I always Google it.
(Still forget it.)
Spelling bee buzzards circle
as I write "separate" with a sly, rogue e—
serpentine sabotage.
It looks right until it doesn’t.
Rhythm’s a rogue—
does it really need that “y”?
It sways on the page like an unsteady waltz,
like a dance partner who definitely
has two left feet.
Sycophants whisper sweet nonsense,
their mouths a blur of hollow praise—
the way they murmur “you’re wonderful”
like a broken record you can never turn off.
Still, I nod, pretending I don’t mind.
Meanwhile metaphors mill
in my mug of morning mud,
slipping slick as similes
down the hatch of half-said things.
If punning were payment
I'd owe on my alliteration loan—
but I bank on bounce,
on tongue-twist tricks,
and the occasional poetic pardon.
- Oizys.
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